#2,077: Gone Girl

This week, the reviews are pretty low on critical thinking. I'd apologize for that, but I'm too thoroughly employed to do anything about anything at the moment.

Devil in a Blue Dress - ★★★½☆
A fun companion to a recent run of movie club movies that included LA Confidential, The Long Goodbye, and Changeling. Good movie. Bad title. Makes me want to start a letterboxd list called "We were SURE this was gonna be a franchise!"

The Drop - ★★★½☆
Went into this one cold. It's pretty good! Pleasantly surprised to see it's written by Dennis Lehane. My favorite thing about Hardy and Rapace are that I don't really know what they look like yet, so I don't have to spend the first twenty minutes of the movie waiting for the character to take over in my head from the big star. (Ahem, Devil in a Blue Dress, ahem.) Movies like this are tough to give a score though, because while I liked it, have no real complaints, and would recommend this movie to YOU, I don't think I will ever want to see it again.

L.A. Confidential - ★★★½☆
I think all I knew about this movie was the clip shown on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vice Presidential Command Performance Academy of Robots' Choice Awards Preview Special, so I thought it was going to be a lot of boring standing around and saying cryptic things with Kim Basinger, who turns out to be in this movie about as much as Danny DiVito is in the poster.

Instead, I liked La Confidentiál, and that I'm glad it was made in the 90s so that it didn't turn out to be Gangster Squad, which I have not seen but I'm willing to assume puts more emphasis on speed ramping the camera than an intriguing plot. I look forward to seeing that movie in 2029 and coming back to write about how wrong I turned out to be.

Gone Girl - ★★★★★
My experience with this movie is similar to Inception, in that I liked it, I'm glad I saw it very close to release day, and I dread most of the inevitable internet conversation to follow.

I didn't know anything about Gone Girl until a week or two ago when my twitter feed started to bubble over with equal excitement for the director, Fincher, and the editing system used, Adobe Premiere. That's probably because of how much I've cut down on reading movie news blogs. If the result of that choice is movies like these popping up out of nowhere and being great, then it was an excellent choice.

#2,073: The Unbelievers

American Psycho - ★★★☆☆
I hadn't seen this for at least a decade. I'm not sure there's a lot more to it than I remembered, or than people love to write about on their blogs every now and then. Christian Bale has excellent elocution. His diction and intonation are what I suspect people really like about this movie, if all people who like things about this movie are me.

Lilo & Stitch - ★★★★★
Man, this is just great. The way some people feel about Glengarry Glen Ross and The Aviator, I think I could go on about Lilo & Stitch. Lots of great lines and moments. A sense of things going on outside of the frame. A little darker or odder than I think you'd think a potential 'Disney Classic' might be. I missed this movie.

Justice League: The New Frontier - ★★½☆☆
Watched on the suggestion of a friend who considers this (and the books it's based on) to be the definitive version of the JLA. While it is a really solid take on the origin of the team and some of its members, it's still yet another origin story, and one I'm tired of hearing.

The Unbelievers - ★★☆☆☆
I see what the subjects of this movie are trying to say, but I don't see what this movie is trying to say. The movie doesn't make a case for atheism; if anything, it makes a case that Krauss and Dawkins need a vacation. I thought we might be getting a LET AMERICA LAUGH type doc, showing them dealing with people they met on tour, but it's not that. It's more like a video yearbook of the fact that there was a tour; a sales pitch video for their speaking agents to use.

Don't miss the credits, which contain a trailer's worth of footage from a more interesting documentary.

#2,071: Justice League: Doom

The Conversation - ★★★½☆
A character study of a man eavesdropping on a Hitchcock film. Another movie I appreciate more now than I used to.

Do the Right Thing - ★★★☆☆
I watched this because it was a million degrees in my apartment and I was feeling freaked out about what's going on in Missouri and I wanted it to help. I think maybe it did, but not for the reasons I was expecting.

The Long Goodbye - ★★★½☆
I like a movie whose world has things that are true and universally accepted, even if those things are not necessarily true in our world. It doesn't create a sense of realism, exactly, but it makes their world seem more complete. Brothers Bloom did that well. This movie does it well. I liked this movie.

Nymph()maniac - Vol. 1: ★★★☆☆ - Vol. 2: ★★½☆☆
I haven't seen all or even most of Lars Von Trier's movies, but based on what I have seen, this was lighter and funnier than I was expecting. Volume 2 is a littler drearier. Like Kill Bill, you get most of your fun in volume 1, then volume 2 is just talk talk talk, comment on the inevitable nature of man, et cetera et cetera.

Justice League: Doom - ★★★★☆
DC beats Marvel by a long shot when it comes to direct-to-dvd / OVA type releases. Even the bad ones are generally higher quality than the Marvel releases, and this was a good one. It's a much smaller, easier-to-digest story than say, Superman: Doomsday, which did a great job with the first half, and then tried to cram 50-some comics into the last half hour.

I think DC has a tougher time explaining their characters solo books with the JLA / team books – like, it doesn't seem as though the shadowy urban legend-type Batman would also hang out in space or coach the JLI, and so their solution is to just ignore it. Batman can be and is everything for everyone at some point. The Batman in this story comes off a bit like a grumpy teen, but at least I could imagine him existing in both spheres. Between that and the illustrated difference in power levels on the JLA, the characterization was nicely handled here.

#2,067: Tim's Vermeer

For a couple weeks there, it was looking like I was going to be editing a feature-length documentary. Scary stuff. I watched a lot of documentaries while the threat was looming.

20 Feet from Stardom - ★★★★☆
It's fun to know that record producers in the day weren't just aping one another with soundalikes, they were actually just hiring the same singers to do everything. You always hear about folks picking sides between the Beatles or the Stones, and although I don't really care about the Beatles, I don't think I'd ever considered that I might prefer the Stones until I saw this. On the production side, the clearances department did as amazing a job as anyone on this. It's one expensive-lookin' movie.

Particle Fever - ★★☆☆☆
I guess my main draw to this project was the editor, as I struggle myself with editing a documentary. I think Walter Murch's presence was more noticeable in the sound design. It seems like there must be interesting stories in and around CERN, but this movie was a little bit snoozy. Another review said it felt more like late night cable and I think I agree.

Also, I'm worried about how close I might be to having a haircut like a physicist.

Downloaded - ★★☆☆☆
I just let netflix play me this one after Particle Fever. They did a fine enough job telling a story in a doc that looks like a doc looks in the age of DSLRs, but it's all pretty old news. So, technically apt, but kind of unnecessary. And now I'm all distracted by that song from Fallout 3 in the credits.

Tim's Vermeer - ★★★½☆
This story is better than this movie. I was kind of intrigued by how low-fi it is. Scenes in England seemed unnecessary, and there's a touch too much Penn; those were the places where the movie wanders a little, and I would have rather had more time to spend on Tim's work. (For instance, after all the worry about how many hours of usable daylight there would be, I would have liked to have been told the answer!) A good example of a doc that needed to be made at the time it was made. For one reason, if the process works, he's not going to want to repeat it for a film. For another, with a movie in the works, Tim is now making two pieces of art, and suffering for one might just help the other.

#2,066: Into the Storm

Yeah there's another version of a GOT Galaxy review in here. I'd been trying a lot of ways to write about it that didn't make me feel like a troll, but my experience of it contrasted so sharply with that of most of my friends or internet acquaintances that I find it really jarring.

In the Loop - ★★★½☆
I liked this more on a second viewing. I feel like I got more of what was going on, but probably I'd just forgotten those details over the past 5 years. This isn't a very good review.

Side Effects - ★★½☆☆
Interesting, but not great. (Like a lot of Soderbergh b-sides.) I think that some of the disconnect for me was how long it took me to notice we'd switched protagonists. I was expecting more of a Manchurian Candidate type plot, so it was fun to be completely wrong about what I was getting into. Some of the third act seems too easy, but I guess seeing all the events in great detail would be a separate, slightly boring movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy - ★★☆☆☆
I was there on opening weekend because of the Marvel Studios logo, but then, I also saw Cars in the theater. Guardians is a bunch of lousy writing slathered in an Attack of the Clones-quantity of nonsensical CG. We're constantly told things instead of shown. Characters announce their development instead of exhibiting it. Gamorra actually shows us the opposite. There's no sense of actual danger or urgency, the references "jokes" are flat, every character has the same story arc, we had as much or more laying track for future movies as the parts of Iron Man 2 everyone supposedly hated...

I left the theater thinking the movie was okay but kind of boring, but the more I consider it (and in the week since, I've been thinking of it a lot, trying to figure out where it is I seem to have gone astray of the (almost suspiciously) overwhelming online opinion) the more its "hey, everyone, this is fun, right? Remember Star Wars guys? What if every character was Han Solo, that's fun, right?" shine is wearing off.

Maybe I'm just not as big a fan of the cosmic Marvel stuff. Or maybe it's comedy. Maybe that's what I don't like. Certainly I don't like the ironic detachment that this thing is soaking in.

Into the Storm - ★★★☆☆
I went to a screening of this with no advance information except the dialogue-free teaser from a few months ago. I was surprised to find out a) it was a found-footage movie, b) it's kind of a comedy, c) it stars Matt Walsh! The audience was more into it and on board than for probably anything else I've seen in a theater this year, which is the best way to see a movie. It's not a great film, but I think it did a great job of hitting its mark. Plus, the b-movie trappings do a great job of hiding the constant VFX. Sure, you know the big tornados are CG, but you look right past the constant sky replacements and foreground additions and debris and everything because you're busy laughing at a silly line or something. From a mock-doc perspective, they didn't cheat too much, and it was generally better motivated that some other recent entries, like End of Watch.